Dharma Blossoms

The Rev. Lynn Ungar writes these words for Flower Communion:

What a gathering — the purple
tongues of iris licking out
at spikes of lupine, the orange
crepe skirts of poppies lifting
over buttercup and daisy.
Who can be grim
in the face of such abundance?
There is nothing to compare,
no need for beauty to compete.
The voluptuous rhododendron
and the plain grass
are equally filled with themselves,
equally declare the miracles
of color and form.
This is what community looks like —
this vibrant jostle, stem by stem
declaring the marvelous joining.
This is the face of communion,
the incarnation once more
gracefully resurrected from winter.
Hold these things together
in your sight—purple, crimson,
magenta, blue. You will
be feasting on this long after
the flowers are gone.

This year our Flower Communion, as it often does in this congregation, coincides with the Memorial Day Weekend. We are also, as we usually don’t do, observing Vesak – so, along with our flowers, I will talk today about the flowering of the dharma – dharma blossoms.

The Buddhist festival Vesak was last Thursday (Thu May 23, 2024) – on the day of the full moon. Buddhist festivals go back for centuries, but they have been local and highly variable from place to place. The first conference of the newly-formed World Fellowship of Buddhists was held in 1950, in Sri Lanka. With representatives from 27 countries, the conference decided that Buddha’s birthday would be celebrated on the full-moon day in May. We don’t know the actual birthday of Siddhartha Gotama, the person who would become known variously as Shakyamuni, Tathagata, Bhagavan, and Buddha. For that matter, we don’t know the actual birthday of Jesus either. The early Christian church celebrated Jesus' birthday in April for a while, then in June, before settling on a date that would allow for co-opting pagan yule celebrations.

The very word “Buddhism” was coined by Western scholars in the nineteenth century. The word "Buddha" is an ancient word, meaning "awake one" -- or perhaps, in contemporary parlance, "woke" -- but neither "Buddhism" nor "Buddhist" have an equivalent in Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, or Tibetan – the languages in which were written the literature that Westerners called “Buddhist.” That literature propounds dharma: the teachings, the way, the truth, the law, reality.

Once Westerners had made clear to these followers of the dharma that what they were was something called Buddhists, they digested that for a while and then started adapting and adopting some of the institutional denominational forms of the Westerners, including forming this World Fellowship of Buddhists in 1950.

I’m a Zen student and practitioner, and a founder and leader of Zen centers for over 20 years. In El Paso, I started and for four years led the Border Zen Center. In Gainesville, Florida, I started and for seven years led the Dancing Crane Zen Center. In White Plains, New York, I started and for ten years led the Boundless Way Zen Center of Westchester. When I moved here to Iowa not quite a year ago I did not establish a Zen center, so for the first time since 2002, I’m not leading a zen group. I expect I will again, eventually, lead a group, but for now, I’m enjoying having a couple years of sabbatical from that – practicing and studying on my own at home and sitting in as a visitor when I can with the Des Moines Zen Center, and occasionally dropping in on our own Awakening Hearts Sangha which meets via Zoom only on Monday evenings.

Zen is the Japanese word which comes from the Chinese word Chan, which comes from the Sanskrit word dhyana, which means meditation. Zen Buddhism is Buddhism in which the primary practice is to sit down and shut up. Don’t concentrate on anything in particular, and don’t try to stifle thinking – just notice what thoughts do come up, and let go of them. Instead of riding on a train of thought from station to station, as the mind tends to like to do, when you notice, “oh, I’m thinking about . . . whatever” . . . release the thought.

It’s never long before another one comes along. Where did it come from? Beyond the general fact that it came from your 100 billion neurons trying to take care of you, there’s no telling where it came from. Just notice that that thought has arisen, and release it rather than jumping on for the ride. Why would you do this?

In my years of leading Zen groups, I’ve greeted many newcomers, and guided them in getting started on the path. People show up at a Zen Center because they think something is wrong with them, their life is broken in some way, and they have somewhere heard something that leads them to suppose that this practice might fix them. What they begin to see, if they’ll sit down and shut up for 20 or 30 minutes once or twice a day, most days, is that they aren’t broke, never have been, and don’t need fixing. We have a hard time believing that, so, those of us who keep at it do so in order to keep re-learning, re-remembering that we are, in fact, whole and perfect exactly as we are.

Strangely, this does end up easing our suffering.

If you take a story about a creator of the universe who is also a law-giver and whomp it up into a religion – that is, add priests with distinctive robes esoteric knowledge that took years of study, which means designating scripture for them to study, and also add special buildings called temples where formalized rituals are enacted, well, you get something rather like Judaism. If you then add to that an eschatology – a story about end times and a second coming – and whomp it up into a religion with priests, scripture, temples, and rituals, you get something like Christianity. But if you take a therapy – a set of practices and treatments for helping people suffer less – and whomp it up into a religion -- adding priests, temples, and so forth – then that’s basically how Buddhism formed.

It’s possible to peel back the religious womping, for those who want it peeled back. Mindfulness based stress reduction, for instance, is the dharma – it’s the teachings and practices of what Westerners dubbed “Buddhism” – but without priests or temples, and with selected scripture re-written in modern language without attribution to its ancient sources -- and without calling itself “Buddhism” because that word, though invented scarcely 200 years ago, is understood to denote a religion.

Indeed, mindfulness and meditation and the insights of the dharma afford spiritual deepening available to anyone of any religion. Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus, and atheists and quite a number of Unitarians have all found their religious experience and awareness expanded through sitting down and shutting up, cultivating mindfulness, and reading and talking about dharma teachings. You don’t have to change your religion in order to take up Zen practice and gain the insights of 1500 years of Zen masters. Some Zen practitioners adopt Zen as their religion, others don’t. Those who do find in Zen a complete religion of practice, teachings, experience, and community. Zen – and, indeed, the Buddhist tradition generally -- is available to people of any, or no, religion, as a practice of wisdom, compassion, living in the present moment, and realizing your true self.

So what teachings can I pick out to lift up for you today? The Awakening Heart Sangha has shared with us two helpful teachings from the Mahayana Sutra, "The Eight Realizations of Great Beings" (Taisho Number 779). (It's a short sutra -- 597 words in Thich Nhat Hanh's English translation. Read it HERE.) The members of Awakening Heart Sangha highlighted two of the eight realizations: that excessive desires cause suffering, and that the mind’s tendency to never feel fulfilled, to insatiably, constantly strive for more can make problems for us. To build on that excellent beginning, or to provide some further grounding for it, let’s look at the customary starting point of Buddha dharma, and that is what is called the four noble truths, as laid out in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta ("The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Dharma Sutra"). Tradition has it that this was the Buddha’s first talk after he had his great awakening.

The first of the four noble truths, as laid out in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta is: Life involves dukkha. Dukkha is generally translated as suffering, or stress, or dissatisfaction. The original reference is to a wheel where the hub, to spot where the axel goes into the wheel, is off center. Imagine you’re riding in a cart where the axel isn’t centered on the wheel. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. So life involves dukkha means life is a bumpy ride.

What Buddha actually says in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta is this, as Stephen Batchelor translates:

“This is dukkha: birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, sickness is dukkha, death is dukkha, encountering what is not dear is dukkha, separation from what is dear is dukkha, not getting what one wants is dukkha.”

But are those things actually suffering? Or can we learn to bear them with equanimity? To answer that question, we turn to another sutra – the Sallatha Sutta -- the two arrows sutra. It says:

“Monks, when the uninstructed worldling is being contacted by a painful feeling, he sorrows, grieves, and laments; he weeps beating his breast and becomes distraught. He feels two feelings – a bodily one and a mental one. Suppose they were to strike a person with an arrow, and then they would strike that person immediately afterwards with a second arrow, so that the person would feel a feeling caused by two arrows. So too, when the uninstructed worldling is being contacted by a painful feeling he feels two feelings – a bodily one and a mental one....

Monks, when the instructed noble disciple is contacted by a painful feeling, he does not sorrow, grieve, or lament; he does not weep beating his breast and become distraught. He feels one feeling – a bodily one, not a mental one. Suppose they were to strike a person with an arrow, but they would not strike that person immediately afterwards with a second arrow, so that the person would feel a feeling caused by one arrow only. So too, when the instructed noble disciple is contacted by a painful feeling he feels one feeling – a bodily one, not a mental one.”

The key teaching here is that our suffering arises not just from what happens to us – that’s the first arrow – but from our reactions and interpretations of those events. An untrained mind amplifies and proliferates the suffering – which amounts to getting struck by a second arrow. It’s our nonacceptance – “I don’t want this! I don’t want this! I don’t want this! This shouldn’t be happening!” -- that makes the suffering much worse, like being hit with a second arrow after the first.

The first arrow cannot be avoided. Life is going to pierce us from time to time. The practice however teaches us how to dodge that second arrow of our reactivity. Notice that dukkha is the first arrow. Recall what the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta said: “Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, sickness is dukkha, death is dukkha, encountering what is not dear is dukkha, separation from what is dear is dukkha, not getting what one wants is dukkha.” There is no avoiding any of that. We can learn to receive these arrows with equanimity rather than with reactivity and thereby avoid the second arrow.

Dukkha is the first arrow; it’s unavoidable. Reactivity is the second arrow; it’s avoidable.

There’s a passage from the Upajjhathana Sutta that is regularly recited at many Buddhist and Zen centers under the title: “The Five Remembrances”:

“I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature of change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My deeds are my closes companions. I am the beneficiary of my deeds. My deeds are the ground on which I stand.”

Those are the five remembrances. And the first three are: old age, sickness, and death are unavoidable. You’ll remember that those are things explicitly identified as dukkha. “Aging is dukkha; sickness is dukkha; death is dukkha.” Those are things that there is no escaping.

First noble truth: life involves dukkha. Second noble truth: the arising of craving. Quoting Stephen Batchelor’s translation, this is the second noble truth:

“This is the arising: it is craving, which is repetitive, wallows in attachment and greed, obsessively indulges in this and that – craving for stimulation, craving for existence, craving for non-existence.”

This is often interpreted as saying craving causes the dukkha, but I don’t think that’s right. Craving is our reaction to the fact of dukkha. Birth, aging, sickness and death aren’t caused by craving. But birth, aging, sickness, and death cause us to react against them, to crave that dukkha go away. The text is not saying that craving causes dukkha; it's saying the dukkha causes craving.

The first noble truth tells us about the first arrow: that’s dukkha. The second noble truth tells us about the second arrow that follows after the first: our reactive craving. Remember: the first arrow is unavoidable; the second arrow is avoidable. Which takes us to the third noble truth: the ceasing.

“This is the ceasing: the traceless fading away and ceasing of that craving, the letting go and abandoning of it, freedom and independence from it.” (Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, trans. Stephen Batchelor)

We all have times when we’re calm, relaxed, all our needs are met, and we aren’t reactive. The training, the practice, is learning to be that way more of the time – to dwell more continuously in the ceasing.

So the fourth noble truth, then, is the eightfold path for training ourselves in equanimity, acceptance, the ceasing of reactivity, the avoiding of that second arrow. Stephen Batchelor’s translation reads:

“And this is the path: the path with eight branches – complete vision, complete thought, complete speech, complete action, complete livelihood, complete effort, complete mindfulness, complete concentration.”

What I’ve been saying is illustrated by a parable from the Buddhist tradition.

The Buddha is traveling around giving talks. One day after his talk, a farmer comes to visit him. The farmer says, “I attended your public talk. It was beautiful; I was moved. Please help me with my problems.”
And the farmer started listing his problems: some of his cows got diseases; the grain market wasn’t consistent; fertilizer prices kept going up; his spouse was sometimes contrary; his children wouldn’t do what he told them; the neighbor’s dog was harassing his chickens.
Finally, the Buddha interrupted him and said, “You have 83 problems.”
This gave the farmer pause, and he said, “I hadn’t counted them, but that sounds about right.”
The Buddha said, “I can’t help you with any of them.”
The farmer was incredulous and angry. "You’re this great, renowned spiritual teacher, and you can’t help me with any of my problems? What good are you?”
Buddha said, “You will always have 83 problems. Sometimes you can solve one of them, or it goes away by itself, but another one pops up to replace it. Always 83. However, perhaps I can help with the 84th problem.”
The farmer said, “What’s the 84th problem?”
The Buddha said, “You think you should have no problems.”

Life IS problems. Call them “challenges” if you like, but problems they are: one after another, and always about 83. Another name for these problems is: life. We’ll always have them – approximately 83 of them, according to the Buddha. But if we crack the 84th problem, then we accept that our problems belong -- they come from being the sort of animal we were made to be. If we meet the problems with open hearts, and love them -- if we are curious about the problems instead of resentful of their presence, interested in where they came from and where they are inviting us to go -- then the problems are not the obstacles we took them to be. They are not the obstacle -- they are the path.

Courageous Facing

We face the fact that we are, we exist. Here we are: animals, vertebrates, mammals, apes that we are.

I spoke two weeks ago about Paul Tillich’s 1952 book, The Courage to Be. The courage to be is the courage to face existence, to affirm our own being in spite of those elements of our existence which conflict with our essential self-affirmation. To face being, however, also means facing nonbeing.

There is what feels like the little non-being: which is that we change. Birch spoke last week about the courage to change – to face change. We may choose change: decide to go to school, or go back to school, or switch careers, move to another city, move in with your love interest – or move out from who had been your love interest – join the army or join a commune. Big decisions. Then there are changes we don’t choose: a tornado blows down your house, you win the lottery, the stock market crashes, your love interest leaves you, you’re offered a big promotion out of the blue, or your neighbors decide to elect fascists.

Whether it’s the change you choose or don’t choose, you face the fact of change and of adapting yourself to the new reality. Change is a confrontation with nonbeing: what was, is no longer; what wasn’t, now is. Becoming is the interplay of being and nonbeing. Life changes – even big changes – feel like the little non-being compared to the end of life – the big non-being, or so it seems.

Unitarian minister Rev. Forrest Church spoke often of these twin truths to courageously face: that we are alive now and we will die. He wrote: “Death is central to my definition of religion: religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” When Dan Cryer wrote a book of the Spiritual Odyssey of Forrest Church, he titled it: “Being alive and having to die.” Our religion, indicates Rev. Church, consists of our response to these two truths, the meaning we make of life on the one hand and of death on the other. It is how we courageously face being and non-being.

To explore this, we begin with the story we heard this morning, “I am Courage” (by Susan Verde). Faith read the lines:

“When my mind tells me ‘I can’t,’ I look inside myself and find the strength that lives deep down, and I tell my mind, ‘Yes, I can.’”

Sure, positive self-talk can sometimes bolster confidence and resilience, helping you take action, persist in the face of obstacles, and seek solutions. You’ve probably also learned along the way that it’s a good thing to know your limitations, that prudence sometimes dictates that you cut your losses; abandon an enterprise rather than continue to pour time and energy into something that’s not worth it. But how do we know when to persevere and when to cut bait?

The problem is, the voice of prudence may get misappropriated by a self-defeatist skeptical voice, and when you self-talk, “yes, I can,” your inner skeptic has some ammo for saying, “You sure about that? Maybe you can’t.”

I do not have – I don’t think anybody could have – an across the board, all-purpose answer to the question of when to push on and when to switch to something more likely to be rewarding. Nor should there be any sweeping general answer. Different people will have different proclivities for persevering versus trying something new – and it’s a good thing that we have that diversity. The same person will, in different types of activities, or at different times in their life with the same activity, persist more or persist less – and that variability is a good thing, too.

But I do have a twist to propose for the self-talk, something to help a little bit to guard against the possibility that a defeatist voice may be prematurely masquerading as the voice of prudence. It’s a point I share with you that I heard at a dharma talk during the six months I was in residence at Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon during 2019-2020. A day at Great Vow Zen Monastery, for the monastics and the residents there, often involved a total of a few hours of meditation in half-hour increments, and the rest of the day we carried out work assignments – in the garden or in the kitchen, or cleaning or fixing something. But for a 7-10-day stretch out of every month, we had sesshin. During sesshin, the meditation (or sitting in meditation posture, sometimes changing sutras or listenting to a dharma talk) bumps up to 10 hours a day. After about the second day, it can feel grueling. Knees hurt, back hurts – mind wanders – and what it’s apt to wander to is, “I can’t do this.”

One of the monks there, Soten Lynch, gave the dharma talk one day during a sesshin, and he addressed the “I can’t” voice. I happened to end up with the text of his talk, so I can quote Soten. He said:

“When the present moment is so appalling that you need to quit, that you need to die, that the thought of continuing is absolutely terrifying – when it’s crystal clear that continuing is not an option, when you have lost all ability to remain present, when hearing a teacher say ‘Be alert. Be alert. Return,’ is really [effing] agitating --the way out of ‘I can’t’ is not ‘I can.’ ‘I can’ is a useless, patronizing self-pat-on-the-back. The way out of ‘I can’t’ is ‘I am.’ The way out of ‘I can’t’ is awareness of the fact that I am doing exactly what it is that I am telling myself I cannot do. What you think you can't do, you are doing. You think you cannot handle this life? You are living. And if you stay put and if you continue and let the sangha hold you -- be it this sangha or the universe itself -- a willingness to experience what you're already experiencing can arise.”

That’s what Soten said. So when your mind says you can’t, well, you can try telling your mind that you can – and sometimes, maybe, that’ll be enough. Your inner skeptic, however, may have it’s doubts. “Can you?” it’ll say. “Where’s the evidence for that?”

But if, instead, you tell your mind, “I’ve gotten this far,” there’s solid evidence that indeed you have. The answer to, “I can’t” isn’t “yes, I can.” It’s “I am” -- “I am” in the sense Soten explicitly indicated of “I am doing the very thing that an inner voice is saying I can’t,” and also “I am” in wider sense “I exist.”

It’s that courage to be that answers the “I can’t” voice. When the mind says, “I can’t,” first, notice that you are. The universe has brought you forth – by accident, by fate, by cosmic design, doesn’t matter. (I lean toward “highly unlikely fluke,” myself, but however it happened, it happened. Here you are.) Courageously facing the fact of existence – which we do by simply, wholly, bringing awareness to our being – is enough. At least for today, our being persists – so, at least for today, we may persist in the projects to which we have set our being.

Our projects of becoming, though, are always projects of nonbeing as well as being. They are the projects of change and thus of the death of the person you used to be. How we face change (chosen and not) is integral to how we face our ultimate bodily death.

Here’s a story. Something happened to me in 2006 on my 47th birthday. When these markers of another year of life gone by come around, like many people, I reflect, take stock, review the time passed, and what might be left. That particular year, I was a half-time minister in El Paso, Texas and also half-time 300 miles away at our congregation in Midland, Texas. My thoughts that day were not particularly dark or depressed. I was sitting in the minister’s office of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Midland on a Thursday mid-morning running over the inventory of 47 years gone by: I spent a lot of years going to school, getting degrees. Had a couple kids. Had some years as a philosophy professor. Divorced, remarried. I’d started practicing Zen almost 5 years before at age 42. Was coming to the end of my second year as a Unitarian Universalist minister. What did any of that, or all of it, mean?

Soon my life would all be over. What did that mean?

Right about then, I don’t know why, something inside me clicked. Something let go, and I had the sensation of a weight falling off me. “I’m going to die,” in that moment felt like such good news. Not that this was actually news -- but that it was a good thing felt like news. What a relief that I won’t live forever! I’m not responsible for eternity. I don’t have to get it figured out. No matter how hard I might try, I can’t succeed at immortality. Life is just a little ffft. I might live another day, I might live another 47 years and reach age 94. That doesn’t matter -- it really doesn’t. Either way, it’s still a little ffft.

As I was growing up, whenever the inevitability of death came up, my parents used to say, “No time soon, we hope.” Now, I’ll grant you that if your spouse has been putting off going to the doctor, and you mention this, and he shrugs and says we’re all going to die anyway, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “Honey, let’s not let that be any time soon.” Sure. Why not take reasonable precautions? Take reasonable precautions and at the same time, there’s an entirely other awareness that can be present, even in the midst of taking reasonable precautions. That’s the awareness that hit me on my 47th birthday.

It was suddenly so clear to me that “no time soon, we hope,” was beside the point. Whether life lasts a minute more or 50 years more, it’s still a little ffft. So relax. There’s nothing I can do about this – thank god, or else I’d have to deal with the temptation to do it. There’s no way out.

As I looked around that minister’s office, the objects around me had a sharpness they hadn’t had before, a kind of poignant yet majestic quality. All of them were as temporary as I was, and they seemed so beautifully self-sufficient being just what they were just at that moment. Understanding the fact of death – not just cognitively knowing it, but living with that continual awareness, makes life ineluctably, ineffably sweet. This runaway train is headed for the cliff, and there’s no way to stop it. It made me love the scenery on the ride.

The ecstatic quality of that moment passed. But I have carried with me for the last 18 years now an abiding gratitude for my mortality. We are not given tomorrow, and that makes having today such a joy, such a delightful, beautiful joy. The more we hold awareness of our own death always in mind, the more life feels sweet and vibrant and real. The more life feels . . . alive.

Something happened in my neurons, no doubt, and what happened changed my life. It was a break from my past patterns where death was something I didn’t want to think about, something I distracted myself away from paying attention to. It’s not that I had been afraid of death. I wasn’t afraid of it – how could I be afraid of it when I rarely thought about it all? Now I have the awareness of death as my constant companion.

What I realized on that day, others have also realized, as I have since discovered. Native American novelist Louise Erdrich writes:

“Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after—lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.”

And the Scottish novelist Dame Muriel Spark wrote:

“If I had to live my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid.”

Sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote

“Let us deprive death of its strangeness. Let us frequent it; let us get used to it; Let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom.”

German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote:

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.”

Does that make sense to you? If I’d read that when I was 42, it would have been a bit murky. Ever since 47, it has made perfect sense. Of COURSE to practice death is to practice freedom.

We all know that all things are temporary, right? But we often don’t act like we know it. We keep going after achievements and acquisitions as if we thought they and we were permanent. We go after that job, or that promotion, or that partner, or that house, and we know, if we stop to think about it, that these things are temporary. Thing is, we don’t much stop to think about it. So we live as if we thought that getting them would be some kind of permanent fix.

As Larry Rosenberg says:

“We know in our heads that we will die, but we have to know it in our hearts. We have to let this fact penetrate our bones. Then we will know how to live. To do that, we need to be able to look at the fact of death with steadiness. We can’t just glance at it casually.”

Then we will know how to live. And when we have grasped that, certain other truths come into view.

For one: My thoughts are not me. I don’t choose them: my thoughts are just something that happens to me, like the weather. The story I have about myself – the narrative the mind creates of a hero – me – nobly sallying forth like Don Quixote to do good things, encounter obstacles, and heroically surmount them, is just a fabricated story – not particularly true or even particularly interesting. The mind creates an illusory self to be the hero of its story, but all of it is in constant flux – no part of it is permanent, and the line between self and non-self is very blurry.

What you are, is not that story your mind continuously fabricates -- the story with you as the hero. What you are is . . . well, everything. The courage to be, then, is ultimately a property of the universe as a whole.

A young Canadian, age 22, was a soldier in World War II. He was captured by the Nazis in Denmark, charged with smuggling arms, and sentenced to death. On the evening before his execution he wrote his final letter. He wrote to his mother:

“I know you are a courageous woman and you will bear this [news of my pending execution], but, hear me, it is not enough to bear it. You must understand it. I am an insignificant thing, and my person will soon be forgotten, but the thought, the life, the inspiration that filled me will live on. You will meet them everywhere – in the trees at springtime, in people who cross your path, in a loving little smile.”

That young man saw that the real him was everything: trees, people, smiles -- and also weeds, mud, mosquitoes, and tears -- the whole catastrophe.

Death means that one brain stops fabricating a story about itself. The true you, isn’t that story and isn’t limited to that one brain. The true you is "mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun, and the moon, and the stars" (Dogen) -- and everything.

Another truth that comes into view concerns the future. I am, like many of us, curious about the future. What new technologies will come along? Will we end war, end hunger, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the Blessings of Liberty? Or will we descend into authoritarianism for a thousand years? What new artistic creations will come? I have wanted to live a long life just to see as much of that as I could. I wanted to be there when the future came.

But now I understand that I will be. I will be there when any future comes, because if anyone’s there, then that’s me.

And it’s also you. And the courage to face eternity condenses into the courage to face just this moment, to bring all our awareness right here, on what is, exactly as it is. Amen.

Courage

Courage.

Some of you might remember that newscaster Dan Rather, back in 1986, took to signing off the CBS Evening News by looking into the camera and saying, “Courage.”

“Dan Rather reporting from New York. Courage. Good night.”

He only used that sign off for one week – five days – and it stirred some controversy and puzzlement. “Was Rather advising viewers to grow a backbone? Was he dismayed at the state of affairs?” (Jake Rossen) – telling us to hang in there through such tough times as he had just been reporting on?

As we take up courage as our theme to explore for the month for May, we confront related questions. What, really, is the point of extolling this supposed virtue called “courage”? In the military context, the carrot and stick combination of praise for courageous action and condemnation of cowardly action does, I guess, make for an effective rhetoric for motivating soldiers in battle. But any active duty military personnel who might be among us not withstanding, do we civilians find the twin concepts of courage and cowardice playing much of a role in our day-to-day lives? Do you use those words when you are giving yourself a talking to? Do they show up on job evaluations that you get, or give?

To talk about courage we have to talk about fear – and if we’re going to find a truly meaningful use for the notion of courage it will grow out of how we understand fear. Courage, as every writer on the subject reminds us at the outset, is not an absence of fear. Courage is what we call it when, in a fearful situation, the fear is managed in a particularly skillful or admirable way.

Animals – humans and otherwise – are built to have fear. The main function of fear and anxiety is to act as a signal of danger, threat, or motivational conflict, and to trigger appropriate adaptive responses. Fear is very valuable. We couldn’t survive without fear. We animals need mechanisms that grab our attention and steer us away from danger.

Even those species with highly sophisticated reasoning processes still need systems of fear reaction because they’re quicker and sometimes time is of the essence. You’ve got head – reason – going on in the cerebral cortex and frontal lobe, and you’ve got gut – feelings and intuitions (which are also primarily processes in the brain, but we use "gut" as a metaphor for those brain systems that might feel as though they're based in our guts -- just as we use "heart" as a metaphor for those brain processes that generate and regulate our feelings of loving connection.) If you want reasoning, Head is gonna have to stop and think: maybe jot down some notes, talk it over with others. That’s how we reason. But if you need a snap judgment, Gut is there for you.

Gut doesn’t worry with having to explain itself – often you can’t explain your hunches, your intuitions. Your Gut, operating below the radar of consciousness, checks for the most readily available examples it can find in the brain’s storage. If an alley looks a certain way, you’ll feel uneasy about walking down it because Gut has grabbed a quickly accessible memory of something you saw in a movie in which someone walked down an alley like this and got attacked. Gut can’t even tell the difference between your first-hand experience and some one else’s stories. Gut believes the examples that are most readily at hand.

Head is gonna want to look at the statistics – the odds of this or that outcome. Statistics completely fail to hold Gut’s attention. Gut believes the examples that are most readily at hand. One or two lurid stories suffice for Gut.

On the other hand, animals, humans and otherwise, also have drives that sometimes override fear and self-preservation – which might be called the biological basis of courage, or might simply be called courage itself. Theologian Paul Tillich, in his 1952 book, The Courage to Be, put it this way:

“the balance between fear and courage is well developed in the animal realm. Animals are warned by fear, but under special conditions they disregard their fear and risk pain and annihilation for the sake of those who are a part of their own self-affirmation, e.g., their descendants or their flock.”

I’ll be coming back to Tillich later.

I originally selected a picture of Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion from the film, The Wizard of Oz, to be on the cover of today’s Order of Service about Courage. Tracy told me we really couldn’t use that because those images are copyrighted. She directed me to a site of public domain photos. I picked a macaw, and texted LoraKim, who is down in Guyana this week organizing parrot conservation, to tell her we were going to have a macaw on our Order of Service. She texted back:

“They are very brave. They risk their lives for their chicks, though not always.”

I texted back,

“Not to mention how brave it is to show up in public wearing those colors.”

Anyway. That bit about “not always,” is important. Evolution built us to have competing drives. We have drives for self-preservation, and these manifest as fear. We also have competing drives to set aside self-preservation and fear for the sake of our children, or our tribe. That’s evolution’s strategy: give us these competing drives, and let us work out the balance: sometimes risking our life for the sake of the chicks -- and sometimes not.

Which drive will prevail in a given circumstance is partly determined by prior experience with similar circumstances. If a similar threat has been successfully chased off in the past, we’re more likely to try to face it down. And it’s partly determined by genetic variations. Some people, and some macaws, are born with a little less or a little more inclination toward personal safety – or little less or a little more proclivity to sacrifice for the sake of offspring or tribe. It’s good to have this variability because the world is constantly changing and sometimes a little bit stronger self-preservation is the best way to get your genes passed on, and sometimes a little bit stronger protectiveness of children, or of tribe, is the best way.

Then somewhere along the growth of the evolution tree, the human twig off of the primate branch developed symbolic language, and we started using words to influence that balance between self-preservation – which we became apt to condemn as cowardly – and willingness to endure personal danger -- which we might praise as courageous, though sometimes we condemn it as rash or foolhardy. The Wizard of Oz’s cowardly lion wants the wizard to give him courage because he wants to face challenges that come his way, and also wants to command respect and admiration. He represents, of course, a certain type of human – and humans, through our symbolic language, are such a hyper-social species that we really want respect and admiration. But we also just want to be safe – hence the lion’s conundrum.

But just as our words can egg us on to be courageous, the reality we collectively weave with language can also magnify our fears. On the one hand, for instance, we have language describing the sources of the living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share. One of those sources is: “Words and deeds of prophetic people challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love.”

When we talk about the prophets, when we speak of our prophetic mission, or our prophetic voice to the world, we are drawing upon a tradition that goes back to the ancient Hebrew prophets -- figures like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Amos, Hosea. We’re thinking about how these figures spoke as the social critics of their time. Standing outside the structures of power, they called the ruling regime to task for failing to live up to its principles, for breaking the covenant. Sometimes they predicted what the consequences would be for having strayed from the right path. Thus the popular understanding of prophecy as predicting the future is not entirely without basis. But the core of what made them prophets was speaking truth to power, the call for social justice -- not predicting the future. When we Unitarian Universalists today call upon this tradition of prophets, we mean to honor the voices for social justice, those who call us all to courage: the courage to stand up to oppression and harm, the courage to witness to and embody the transforming power of love.

The prophets of old, ventured into predictions of the future, and, yes, they used fear. They warned the people of Israel that their corrupt religion and disregard for the poor would result in destruction of the nation. They called for Israel to repent or face a fearful judgment of wrath. So, usually, it’s not a simple matter of fear versus courage. The prophets used fear of one thing in their effort to evoke courage in facing a different fear: the insecurity that the powerful feared if they allowed there to be justice. Today we speak out against harm to our environment, to our eco-systems, to our climate, to our planet, invoking modern-day predictions of doom and destruction. We do so in the hope of spurring the courage to leave behind the comforts of our high consumption lifestyles.

Once we had symbolic language, we could conjure up imagined scenarios for each other, and the potential disasters grab our attention a lot more than potential benefits. So the balance or tension that evolution built into animals got thrown off in the animal with symbolic language. We talk ourselves into quite the dither of fear. We are awash in scared people earnestly talking others into being scared.

After the 9-11 attacks in 2001, fear of airplanes went up, as you might imagine. Analyzing patterns of car use and airplane travel after 9-11 shows that there was a shift from airplanes to cars that lasted about one year. It took a year for the fear of airplanes to die down, return to normal levels, and in the meantime, people were putting in more miles by car. The thing is, airplane travel is safer. As automobile travel went up, so did traffic fatalities. Gerd Gegerenzer analyzed the numbers, and was able to deduce that the extra car travel in the year after 9-11 killed 1,595 people. That is, the number of Americans killed in car crashes as a direct result of the switch from planes to cars was just shy of 1600. Those were people who would not have died if the ratio of plane travel to car travel had stayed the same as it was the years preceding 9-11. The actual collapse of the twin towers killed less than 3,000 people. The increased fear of airplanes over the next year killed over half again that many.

Things that spook us include, in no particular order:
tornadoes
internet stalkers
crystal meth
avian flu
genetically modified organisms
contaminated food
contaminated water
contaminated air
climate change
carcinogens
clowns
breast implants
the obesity epidemic
pesticides
the next viral pandemic that will be much worse than the last one,
Ebola
West Nile virus
mad cow disease
flesh-eating diseases
alien invasion (the international kind)
alien invasion (the interplanetary kind)
spiders
road rage
pedophiles lurking in parks and internet chat rooms
spontaneous combustion
Satanic cults
heroin
herpes
hitchhikers
computer hackers
identity thieves
genetically enhanced bioweapons
self-replicating nanotechnology that turns everything into “gray goo”
AI robots that decide humans are unnecessary
weird experiments in physics that could create a black hole destroying the planet
and sharks.

There seems to be an awful lot to be scared of. It is the slogan of our times: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” At home, children are forbidden from playing alone outdoors, as all generations did before, because their parents are convinced every bush hides a pervert.” As it happens, as Daniel Gardner points out in The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t – and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger:

“Obesity, diabetes, and the other health problems caused in part by too much time sitting inside are a lot more dangerous than the specters haunting parental imaginations.”

We overestimate the risk from things that make the evening news, and underestimate the risk from things that don’t. Murder, terrorism, airplanes flying into buildings, fire, flood – and sharks – seize our fearful imaginations. Risks like diabetes, asthma, and heart disease – and auto accidents -- are much greater but they’re boring. Maybe it’s time for the word courage to take a bigger place when giving yourself a talking to. As Noam Shpancer says, “Fear is an important consultant, but a lousy boss.”

As you set out to cultivate courage, the first step, I suggest, is to notice that, like the lion in The Wizard of Oz, you’ve always had it. The lion was quite brave in the scenes of taking on the wicked witch – and in the book, though it isn’t in the movie, there’s a scene where Dorothy and the companions encounter creatures that are half-tiger, half-bear, called Kalidahs. The lion initially cowers in fear, but then summons his courage, leaps forward, lets out a mighty roar, and the Kalidahs scatter in fear. Later, the wizard recognizes that people called heros haven’t got any more courage than the lion has, "but they do have one thing you haven’t got: a medal." So the wizard gives the lion a medal to symbolize his courage, and serve as a reminder that though fear may sometimes well up in him, he is courageous.

Following that model, it might be helpful to designate some object or trinket to serve for you like a medal for your conspicuous bravery -- a token reminder and symbol that you are courageous.

As a further way to hold in mind and heart that you are already courageous, call to mind the substantial courage you exhibit in daring to exist. You got a lot of nerve! Showing up, on this planet, morning after morning – there you are. The audacity! This is the courage Paul Tillich elucidated in The Courage to Be. Tillich says:

“The courage to be is the ethical act in which [we] affirm [our] own being in spite of those elements of [our] existence which conflict with [our] essential self-affirmation.”

We saw that term, "self-affirmation," earlier, when I cited Tillich observing that animals, human and otherwise,

“are warned by fear, but under special conditions they disregard their fear and risk pain and annihilation for the sake of those who are a part of their own self-affirmation, e.g., their descendants or their flock.”

To be as the beings we are, to affirm ourselves, is itself the ground of our care of offspring and flock or tribe. To be – to affirm that we are – like Ilsa in Frozen singing “here I stand, and here I stay. Let the storm rage on” -- is an act of courage.

The courage to be, for Tillich, has two aspects. There is the courage to be as a part – the courage to bring your being to participate in a larger being with others. Then there is the courage to be as oneself – a unique individual and an end unto yourself, not a means toward any group goal.

We face anxiety: anxiety about dying and the unpredictability of fate and fortune; moral anxiety about guilt and condemnation, and spiritual anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness. These anxieties conflict with our self-affirmation, so to affirm who we are in the face of these anxieties, to affirm our being in spite of existential anxiety, that’s the courage to be. We enact this courage in those two ways: by participating in a larger whole that helps sustain our own existence and others, and by individuating as worthy in ourselves – balancing between extremes of too much collectivism and too much individualism.

I was intrigued to see that, while courageous and brave are nearly perfect synonyms, they come from wildly different etymological origins, which, over centuries, converged. “Courage” comes from heart, as the seat of emotions, as in the French word for heart, coeur, the Spanish corazon; Italian cuore. From “heart,” referring to one’s spirit, temperament, or frame of mind, it came to mean valor, or the quality that allows for meeting dangers and troubles without being controlled by fear. So when Dan Rather said, “courage,” he could have said “take heart,” and conveyed about the same idea.

Brave, however, started from the Latin pravus, meaning “crooked, depraved,” became the medieval Latin bravus, meaning “cutthroat, villain” which then evolved to mean “wild, savage.” From there, wild and savage were more and more closely associated with meeting dangers and troubles without being hindered by fear until it meant about the same thing as courageous.

These roots nicely parallel Tillich’s two aspects of courage: the courage to be as a part of collective projects and the courage to be as oneself. "Courage," from heart, as the symbol of love, connects us to others so that we can face dangers for the sake of our joint enterprises. "Bravery," in its origins, points to the strength to affirm your wild, untamed, nonconformist uniqueness.

On the one hand, fear can make me so self-protective I do not hear the call to love, to connect with others, to help them in shared difficulties. On the other hand, fear can make me seek the safety of conformity, going along to get along, not hearing the call to bring forth what I alone can.

Against all fears or anxieties about impending death, the unpredictability of fortune and misfortune, about our feelings of guilt, of having been or possibly being condemned by others, or by oneself, and the spiritual anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness – against all those fears – the courage to be is the inner voice affirming that you are and what you are. On the ground of that courage we find the courage to face forthrightly all the other fears conjured by Gut or Head.

Meredith Garmon reporting from Des Moines. Courage. Amen.